


A Place For Torching

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-09
Updated: 2010-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 03:19:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The desert brings, inevitably, memories of war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Place For Torching

They cover the windows of the car and trucks with brown cloth and pray that a sandstorm doesn't swallow them whole while they sleep, hope that they don't wake up buried into a dune, becoming part of the landscape. Quite a poetical death, Roy comments, but hopefully the desert won't turn on them like a trap. There's the guides from Xing, staying up and circling a small fire to get them through the night, keeping a fragile watch against the weather, but what can these men do against sand and wind? These men that dress in reasonable black and Roy and Riza stare in awe at the litheness of their limbs, their own bodies complacent, ex-soldiers in peacetime always are.

The desert brings, inevitably, memories of the war; not unexpected but perhaps a bit intrusive. The trouble with happiness is that it makes you see any memory of pain as an embarrassment. This is not Ishval but it could be, if they narrow their eyes – an horizon is an horizon, a dune is a dune, the grains of sand in their hair and between their clothes. Years have passed, and though they have never forgotten (they haven't allowed themselves to forget) it surprises them, now and alone, how much they themselves have changed against a landscape that has not.

Riza, on the driver's seat – he told her to go to the back but she said she didn't want to sleep yet – watches the night through the windowpane.

He can read her face.

`The sky is different here,´ he tells her and goes on to explain the new position of the stars, the terrifying clarity of a desert with no clouds behind which to hide. It has been often in history the employment of lovers, to count stars and name them with the care of bedside tale.

Riza rests her cheek against the wheel, head turned so she can hold both the stars and Roy in the same glance.

He takes her hand in his. The noise he makes when he shifts in his seat – his clothes crumple, a low hiss against the leather – fills the vehicle with blunt-edged anticipation, very particular to people who know each other very well and can read slightest movement, a fallen elbow or a lifted chin, the new shadow of a knee as it draws closer to the other body, predict a soundless storm there.

He moves his hand to her shoulder, resting it there for the length of time it takes the cover on the car to flutter with the breeze and tap on their window once, twice. He stretches his arm and touches her skin over the rough cloth of her handkerchief, the one she used all day to breathe through the desert when the wind rose clouds of sand around them.

It is so easy for them to start: Riza pushes her head back, into her seat, and lets his knuckles tease a sensitive spot under her chin. Skin to skin, the electricity, the depth of history and feelings, passes between them like a rumour through a city, bolting free into streets and houses, whispered but spreading. The skin, like the heart, finds it easy to catch fire.

`I find it hard to believe,´ Riza says, desire obvious in her voice but holding the moment back with perversion almost childish, `that a train could ever cross these lands.´

`Ah,´ Roy mutters, as if suddenly remembering the purpose of this journey and finding it absurd that this purpose had nothing to do with how the hollow of her neck trembles now under his fingertip. `But we should be good at believing things that are hard to believe by now.´

He flashes her a boyish grin.

Riza grabs his arm, just above the elbow, and uses her grip on him to pull herself against him, climb that space, her knee falling awkwardly between their seats, the open palm of her hand on the wheel, pushing her up.

Outside the hard cloth rattles against every part of the car, the ropes that hold them together stretching with a whining noise and beat the roof of the vehicle, the wind increases speed. The night is growing cold but it's hard to imagine that inside, his hand still on her throat, rubbing his thumb above the collarbone, threatening with fingernails as if his need was just as raw as they first time they made love to each other.

It is.

She kisses him, sucking his lower lip while she uses his thighs to prop herself and sit at the edge of his knees, with one forearm resting and pressing, hard, to the window glass, while he removes her handkerchief and runs his index over the exposed skin, a explorer uncovering a secret he knows by heart, the heat of her body in love, sweat pooling and dripping, bloats of ink on a private journal, the paper soft from careful loving hands passing each page many, many times.

A desert used to be a place of war and regret, responsibility. They are reclaiming it for themselves and only themselves now, the place changed but the appearance close enough to make meaning out of this moment. Enough to trigger memories. Those memories heavy enough to be challenged, revoked by another kind of heaviness, her weight on his body, his hand on her breast.

Riza slides up, sitting on his lap now. She can feel him hard under her. Her lips curled into a smirk and she pushes down, twists her hips until she can hear him surrender a groan. She knows this noises of him so well, she classifies them like a compendium of rare animals. If she shifts to the left his breathing hitches up, the noises become high-pitched and short; if she slides her knee up his right thigh he grunts, holding an open palm to the small of her back, drawing her closer until her mouth is back on his.

There's no light coming from outside, no moon or stars in view, just the rustic, yellow light of the hand-lamp they tossed on the back seat. Roy undoes the first two buttons of her brown shirt and watches for a moment that bit of white skin just above where her undershirt covers the rest, he forces himself to stay still and watch that spot – it moves, Riza breathes, her weight on him happy and a torture – as long as he can bear until he leans and puts his lips to it, the skin receptive and untouched by a day of sun.

He lifts his hand to touch her cheek and finds sand in the spot behind her right earlobe, juts as she finds sand in his hair when she twists her fingers around it and pulls just a bit, she opens her mouth slightly, bare teeth that betrays the extent of her arousal. She catches his arm as his fingers dart down the back of her head to the hollow between her shoulder blades, under her shirt. She tugs at it and makes Roy pull away. She holds his hand in front of her like a trophy.

She licks the palm of his hand, stopping on each scar and trace of scar, letting her tongue redraw them, dipping it along the valley of his line of Life, and them pushing one, two fingers into her mouth, sucking gently, and she watches Roy's eyes lose focus and cloud for a moment. She grabs his wrist and puts his hand between her legs, under her clothes.

His fingers twist, knowing her so well, and Riza falls forward and buries her face in his neck, drawing a long, hissed breath.

She pants into the crook of his collarbone, his clothes warm and worn against her cheek. Her hand wanders along the curve of his stomach as he is sitting and she doesn't open her eyes when she starts undoing the fly on his trousers. She is swift like their days are numbered, like they don't do this every day (the feel of him on her hand, hard and free, it's familiar and almost comforting, empirical proof of what often was left unsaid, open to hypotheses).

Roy tries to pull down her clothes as well but she is sitting across his legs. He makes a frustrated sound, like a sigh, and kisses her neck.

`Let me...´ she trails off. They don't have patience for the time and the mess of undressing, so Riza maneuvers turning away from him, throwing one leg over his lap and rolling, until she has her back to Roy, her hands on the dashboard, her knees pressed to the glove compartment.

She unbuckles her belt and with Roy's help – thumbs hooked under the waistband, the shape and feel of her and her clothes so familiar he could do this in more complete darkness than this place has to offer – she pulls trousers and underwear down in a moment. The bare skin of her thighs brushing against his clothes, sensitive, all that sand in between that one can never completely shake off. Roy places his fingers around her throat and pushes her head back, to him.

A pungent smell under her hair on the back of her neck, like fruit in the sunlight. Roy brushes it away with fingertips and mouth. His tongue darts, loops, twines - it raises moans from the back of her throat. She can feel him against the underside of her legs, hard, alive, pulsating. He lets his hand rest on her hip, heavy, almost lazy and Riza needs no other direction; she shifts her weight a bit, just enough, kicking her heels to the floor of the car, while Roy's hands are there for balance. He slips in easily, comfortably, she's learned to wear him around her like skin, and yet habit could never make this moment anything less than extraordinary.

Roy puts his arms around her and hugs her from behind, tightly, and for a moment he looks like he is content with that. Riza digs her nails into his thighs and says his name like a question mark, but all the sounds come out scorched, the back of her throat burnt by desire.

He doesn't let go but he pulls back ever so slightly and then pushes his hips up. He puts his mouth to the hair over the back of her neck. He rolls his hips and can't quite tell if the moan that comes from that is his or hers. They move with maddening slowness, languid, long thrusts and Riza grabbing the handle of the door to prop herself up, Roy resting her every inch they are not touching but welcoming her when she falls back on him. He feels hollowed out when they are like this, when they are restless not just tender, when they are new as well as familiar. He did not know _want_, as well as love, could have so many shades for the same colour, could take so many shapes in the shape of the same person.

He feels himself pushing quickly into the climax, despite his efforts to slow himself down (Riza grinds back into him and takes his hand in hers and places it over her heart; he brushes his thumb over her nipple, hardened, the desert clothes thin and rough like sandpaper, and the knowledge of her pleasure is almost enough).

He says something into her ear, a sickly sweet voice, content and desperate at the same time, and it could be her name, or it could be swearing, or just a moan.

It could be just a plea, and when he places his open palm on her back, just above her ass, she understands and she bents over, pressing forearms against the dashboard, angling her body so that he can push harder and harder into his two, three last thrusts.

`_Please_.´

His hand slides up her spine and he comes with his hand over that often-read, well-loved map. Riza has learned she doesn't mind him touching old scars because she wants him to touch her _everywhere_.

When he is done, and he is still inside her, he reaches his hand between her legs and their bodies and his fingers are clumsy in his haze but she comes almost as soon as they touch her anyway. Roy holds her with his free hand as she does, pushing her even deeper, so that every ripple, every muscle twitching and untangling sends back an echo into him, a murmur through his own flesh. He kisses her nape afterwards and she utters his name and a curse and a whimper and it just feels like it's going to be too much.

They settle down as easily as they started, Riza stretching her legs across his lap and finding a place between his chest and the door of the car. They readjust limps upon limbs with the skill of a puzzle-maker. She rests her head into the hollow of his shoulder as Roy places one hand across her stomach and the other on the window. He draws patterns on the glass and then stops to caress her temple, brush her hair off her eyes.The wind has lifted their cover on one of the corners and they can see a revealed stretch of sky.

It looks like there won't be a sandstorm after all, they won't be buried by the desert. They breathe heavily and slowly pressed to each other's bodies, and they begin to count stars again.


End file.
